Friday, April 03, 2015

It's Easy To Believe They're Freaks

Maybe that's the "sour grapes" approach to not wanting to put time and effort into improving memory:

Neuroscientists have long tried to measure our maximum mental volume.
However, what scrambles any simple reckoning of memory capacity is the
astounding cognitive feats achieved by dedicated individuals, and people
with atypical brains...

Could people endowed with super-memories, then, have exceptional brains?

The
short answer: no. Pi record holders, like Lu, as well as most winners
of memory championships swear they are just regular people who have
dedicated themselves to training their brains for holding and retrieving
selected pieces of information.

Nelson Dellis, a USA Memory
Championship winner, says that his memory was actually awful before he
became a competitive mental athlete. Practice made all the difference.
"Within weeks of training, maybe even less, you're doing something that
seems almost impossible to the normal person," says Dellis. "We all have
this skill within us."